Kevin Jones talks about "NGINX: a smart middle man between your app and your users" in this episode of ColdFusion Alive Podcast, with host Michaela Light.

Kevin is one of the speakers for the upcoming Into The Box  ColdFusion Conference, where he will talk about Using NGINX as an Effective and Highly Available Content Cache.

In his ITB talk, he wants people to understand what NGINX means and the powerful features contained in the platform that can be used in building an HTTP caching layer, and why NGINX is often used as a framework to build powerful, scalable and highly available content delivery networks.

"Right now there's about 350 million known websites on the internet today that use NGINX, so it has a really, really large footprint. It's widely adopted in the community, and now NGINX is a company. So, we've built NGINX Plus, which is a commercial version on top of that open source version, so we kind of handle both sides of the matrix." - Kevin Jones

Show notes

What is NGINX?

A smart middleman between your app and your users

Good for DevOps

But it is not a network firewall, but be used to build a web application firewall

When you should be using it

A 10-year history and the hockey stick growth in features happening right

How it works with Docker containerization and microservices

Application Delivery Controller (ADC) - virtualized load balancer

Round Robin

Least Response Time

Least Connections

Requeuing of request

How it can implement smart Layer 7 Security fast

API gateways in your DMZ

Blocking by IP, subnets, ports

Authentication

Protections for Denial Of Service attacks

Metered access

Country blocking

The value of virtual proxy software

The power of NGINscript (JavaScript-like language)

What are you looking forward to at Into The Box?

Mentioned in this episode

NGINX 

Virtual web server

Open source and commercial versions

Igor Sysoev CTO, based in Russia

TPC

UDP

SSL optimization

Asynchronous non-blocking architecture

Shared memory zones for all the workers

Load balancing

GUIP

Proxy

HTTP via proxy

HTTP caching

Streaming media

Layer 7 Security

Listen to the Audio

 

Bio

Kevin Jones

Kevin Jones is a Technical Solutions Architect at NGINX, where he specializes in the integration and implementation of NGINX for various companies around the world. He has a strong background in infrastructure management, application monitoring, and troubleshooting.

Links

Blog

Twitter

Interview transcript

Michaela Light:                 Welcome back to the podcast. I'm here with Kevin Jones, from NGINX, and he's going to be talking about the past, present, and future of the modern web using NGINX, which, as I understand it, is kind of like a virtual middle man between your app and the users of your app, and it has lots of applications. So, we're going to be looking at what it is, when you should be using it, looking at the 10-year history of it, and the hockey stick growth in feet just that's happening right now with it, how it works with docker containerization and microservices, application delivery controller, virtualized load balances, how it can implement smart layer seven security fast, the value of having a virtual proxy software with the power of engine stripped to let you customize it.

And welcome, Kevin.

Kevin Jones:                      Thank you. Nice to talk to you.

Michaela Light:                 Yeah. So, what exactly is NGINX?

Kevin Jones:                      Yeah, so NGINX has been around for a while. It's been around since 2007. It's actually originally an open source project, and still is an open source project, and essentially it's a lot of things. Essentially it's a web server, it's a reverse proxy, it can do HTTP caching, and it can also do load balancing of traffic, and it can also do TCP and UDP traffic as well, proxying. So,